On Monday, March 1, Waco Tribune-Herald reporter Mark England was on the biggest story of his life.

The story of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians -- a subject England and reporter Darlene McCormick had been investigating for almost a year -- was suddenly New York Times front-page material. The morning after the reporters' series on the cult began, federal agents had stormed the Davidians' compound, leaving behind four dead agents and fixing the eyes of the nation on the self-proclaimed Messiah. At the Tribune-Herald, the phones were ringing; reporters from faraway newspapers were pestering England for background as he was frantically trying to get the next day's story together.

One phone call, however, stood out. The caller was all sugar-voiced and Hollywood-smooth: What a wonderful series you've done, the voice said. Wouldn't you like to take the story further, get it out to a wider audience?

More calls like this -- with a strikingly similar format -- came in from movie producers, agents, and publishers. "I told them I was trying to write the story; I can't take out the time to write a book," England recalls. "This is not the time to be negotiating something."

Yet in the following days, while agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were negotiating with cult leader Koresh, another kind of negotiating was going on outside Ranch Apocalypse. The race from fact to paperback, from real-life drama to reality-based melodrama, had begun. Publishers and producers were prowling for exclusive stories and writers to tell them -- fast.

Journalists are a natural choice in the race to bring out a book or a movie on a major event. They are quick studies, trained to tune into human drama and pathos, and often come with sources and a store of knowledge. And, accustomed to a slim pacycheck, reporters may find the promise of quick money tempting.

Should they take it? Journalists in Waco had varying responses to this question.

"I didn't realize at the time what the game was," says the now somewhat jaded England in his soft Texas drawl. "It's apparently not to do the best story possible, but to just get something out. . . . It's questionable how much information you'd have [in a month] to do a good book. It would be tough to pull off."

In all, in the first days after the siege began, England and McCormick received about thirty calls from producers and another five from book agents. One producer even flew out, in vain, to woo them; another proposed paying them $ 50,000 to $ 75,000. A week after the first call, the reporters hired a New york agent to handle the offers.

Then, ten days after the standoff began, by which time NBC had already begun to produce a TV movie, the requests virtually stopped. McCormick and England still want to write a book, they say, but one that is well thoughtout. "It wasn't a quickie story," says McCormick, "so how could I write a quickie book?"

On March 4, the fifth day of the siege, at another office in Waco, book pulisher Wayman Spence and former reporter Bob Darden were shooting the breeze about one of Darden's books for WRS Publishing when the conversation veered, inevitably, to David Koresh. It turned out that Darden, who teaches writing part-time at Baylor University in Waco, had researched the Davidians years before, and had even kicked around the idea of a book about them. In addition, he had easy access to thousands of pages of oral history and other documents on the Branch Davidians archived at Baylor. Means, material, motive -- it was all there. "Let's get on it," Spence told his writer.

Darden, who had spent nine years with the Waco Tribune-Herald and produced eleven books, was known as a fast writer. Once the standoff began, his agent in Dallas got two other offers to do a fast book.

But Darden decided to stick with Spence as his publisher; after all, he says, Spence was the only one who didn't want his television and movie rights as well. Darden now has two other agents working on selling those rights. He is writing the book with a co-author, Brad Bailey -- Darden for the historical background, Bailey for the events during the seige.

Still, Darden didn't like the idea of doing a quickie book. "I'd like to follow every little lead, drag this out over a year," he says, adding that the book will be carefully footnoted and annotated. But other considerations won out in the end, including "base financial reasons. Nobody wanted to pay me to do one at a leisurely pace. Pretty crass, I guess."

Tim Madigan, a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, hopes he has found a way to dovetail his interests with those of his instant-book publisher.

"Their thing was to be the first book," Madigan says. "My goal as a journalist was, given those ground rules, to write a good book."

Madigan has never heard of David Koresh until the ATF botched the raid on February 28. He spent the first three days of the standoff outside the compound, but soon left to return to his newspaper. A week later he was offered a book contract and he took a month's leave to report and write it. Madigan says he logged nearly sixty interviews, with Koresh's relatives, followers, and their families, including a four-hour interview with Koresh's grandmother. He couldn't reach Koresh's mother. "She'd sold her rights," he says.

He believes his book will help advance the story, rather than sensationalize it. "I was presented with this opportunity," Madigan says. "How it is perceived, I don't care."

By late spring, the race to publish first was tight. Former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Clifford L. Linedecker's book (Massacre at Waco, Texas: The Shocking Story of Cult Leader David Koresh and the Branch Davidians) was published by St. Martin's Press on May 17. Madigan's book (See No Evil: Blind Devotion and Bloodshed in David Koresh's Holy War, published by the Summit Group, Fort Worth, Texas) came out in the same week. A book by former cultmember Marc Breault, with Australian TV journalist Martin King (Inside the Cult: A Member's Exclusive Chilling Account of Madness and Depravity in David Koresh's Compound, published by Signet) appeared in June. Darden and his co-author (Mad Man in Waco: The Complete Story of the Davidian Cult, David Koresh, and the Waco Massacre, WRS Publishing) got the first three chapters to their editor by May, with a publishing date of August 1.

Even the besieged cult leader had been negotiating with publishers for the rights to his autobiography. On April 7, five and half weeks into the standoff, The New York Times reported that Koresh had authorized his Texas lawyer to hire two New York City lawyers, Kenneth Burrows and Michael Kennedy, to act as his literary agents. Days earlier, the lawyers had faxed a letter to publishers soliciting bids with a suggested minimum price tag of $ 2.5 million for the rights to Koresh's life story.

Inside the compound, meanwhile, Koresh had begun to write something different, a manuscript about the Book of Revelation. Negotiators had promised him that he would be able to finish it later, in jail.

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